Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

Acquired directly from the Artist by the previous owner, circa 1970
Their sale, Sotheby's London, 11th December 2006, lot 124, where acquired by the present owner

Cambridge, Arts Council Gallery, The Gregory Fellows, 8th - 29th February 1964, cat. no.25, where lent by Waddington Galleries, London, with Arts Council tour to Bolton, Liverpool, Nottingham, Southampton, Cardiff.

David Lewis et. al., Terry Frost, Scholar Press, Aldershot, 1994, p.87 (illustrated as Drowning Blue).

There are pin holes and nail heads visible at irregular intervals along the extreme edges, with very slight scuffing to the bottom corners, only visible upon very close inspection. There is a small area of previous damage to the centre of the top edge. There is slight flattening to some of the raised elements of thicker impasto, with reticulation to the top layer of paint throughout. This excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals isolated areas of fluorescence to the extreme edges in line with the aforementioned nail heads, and further isolated traces in these areas. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Frost painted this work at a time when the international reputations of many of his friends and contemporaries, Frost included, were being forged, making St Ives one of the leading centres of avant-garde art in Britain.  In 1959, Frost joined the Waddington Galleries and was included in an exhibition titled `Middle Generation’ along with Heron, Hilton and Wynter. Frost’s open and expansive paintings of this period demonstrate an awareness of current trends in America.  In 1960, the same year that Frost painted this work, he had his first one-man exhibition at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery where he met fellow American artists:

`In New York they all came to my exhibition, de Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Newman, Motherwell.  I was staying with Larry Rivers. Newman and Motherwell took me to their studios ... they would sleep until noon, do eight or nine hours in the studio, and then starting at eleven at night proceed to drink me under the table! Then we’d go at four in the morning and have breakfast at a Chinese restaurant’ (the Artist, in an interview with David Lewis, October 1993, quoted in David Lewis et. al.,Terry Frost, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1994,  p. 84).

Night Blue draws the viewer into its heart, the vigour of the expansive brushstrokes belying the delicate network of forms that dance under the surface, each a stage on the path to the final image. Although originally exhibited under the title Night Blue which we have retained, in David Lewis’ monograph the painting is titled Drowning Blue, and this sense of forms seen through an almost translucent surface, heightened of course by the palette, does indeed give the impression of colours drowning in colour.

Frost was at this time exploring how he might introduce the figure into his otherwise almost abstract compositions. His work of this period can be related to that of his friend Roger Hilton with whom he had corresponded regularly whilst Frost was teaching in Leeds. From the late 1950s, references to the figure enter both artists’ work. Hilton’s magisterial Aral Sea (Private Collection) of 1958, which uses a central form not dissimilar to that in Night Blue was interpreted by Chris Stephens as having evident female qualities (Chris Stephens, Roger Hillton, Tate Publishing, London, 2006, p.44), and if this was also so in the present painting, one might be able to see links with works produced in 1959 such as Blue and White Figure 1959 (Private Collection) and Terre Verte and White Figure 1959 (Coll. Wakefield Museums and Galleries) where Frost produces images that can be read as both fully abstract but also as schematised female figures.